The background description provided herein is for the purpose of generally presenting the context of the disclosure. Work of the presently named inventors, to the extent it is described in this background section, as well as aspects of the description that may not otherwise qualify as prior art at the time of filing, are neither expressly nor impliedly admitted as prior art against the present disclosure.
Communication equipment such as routers, gateways and other forwarding systems for homes and small offices are designed to connect multiple devices in one network to each other and to another network. Typically, such forwarding systems handle multiple connections of incoming and outgoing streams or data flows. For example, in a home network, a forwarding system may route a streaming video to a television, a gaming session to a computer, and a file download to another computer. A forwarding system generally receives data packets from a source device in a first network, performs packet parsing and classification, queues the packets, and forwards the packets to the appropriate destination device in the second network. Additionally, the forwarding system receives packets from various devices in the second network, and processes and forwards the packets to the first network. Within the forwarding system, the processing of all packets is typically performed either by executing software with a processor such as a CPU (Central Processing Unit), or by using a dedicated hardware forwarding device.